Chin Saik Yoon
Chief Editor

The page numbers cited in this article refer to pages within the Digital Review of Asia Pacific 2003/2004 Edition.

Asians became the largest Internet user group towards the end of 2001. An estimated 160 million users had gone online across Asia Pacific by then. They accounted for 33 percent of all Internet users in the world and nudged North American users from the top spot by just one percentage point (ITU, 2002).

What is significant about this milestone is not Asia Pacific taking first place, but that the region had done so with such a small proportion of its population having Internet access to begin with. The most populous nations in the region also happen to have some of the lower Internet-user densities per 10,000 inhabitants – 68 for India, 191 for Indonesia, and 256 for China. The potential is therefore vast.

While the rural hinterlands of the region were busy spinning the first strands of their Web, other parts in the region have raced ahead. Hong Kong, India, Japan, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan have become global leaders in a number of areas ranging from broadband technologies, hardware and gaming to call centres, offshore software development and backroom operations.

Several countries, particularly Singapore and Malaysia in Southeast Asia, had profited as regional manufacturing hubs for hardware companies. But they are suffering deepening losses because multinational companies are relocating their hubs to lower-cost production centres in China. As a result, the “bust” in Southeast Asia has been happening in tandem with a “boom” in China. To some observers, this is another episode in the continuing “race to the bottom” where localities and nations compete to attract capital investment in a globalised digital economy (Schiller, 2000).

Although a sizeable portion of the manufacturing of ICT goods takes place in Asia Pacific, much of the value created in this process goes to intellectual property rights (IPRs) holders located outside the region. The same is also true of ICT services. India has been a highly productive international software originator centre for a number of years, but, as in the case of hardware, the IPRs for what the Indians create belong overseas. Another example of this occurring in the content field comes from New Zealand, which provided not only the stunning locations for the Lord of the Rings trilogy but also much of the digital special effects seen in these highly successful films. But here again the larger chunk of the IPRs for the productions is locked away overseas (see p. 209).

There are exceptions though; they are found in Korea, Japan, Singapore and Taiwan – bases to a significant number of homespun international ICT companies and global brands. These successful exceptions have matured into role models of what is possible for the region.

Even more inspiring is the active group of ICT professionals in the region who are not driven solely by profit-oriented IPRs. The open source movement in a number of Asia-Pacific countries operates purely according to altruistic principles. Indonesia is a good example. “Copyleft” software, or software without copyright restrictions, runs a large number of the computers in the country (p. 103). Indonesian innovators have gone a step beyond software and have started to freely share cleverly adapted wireless technologies to bring Internet access to communities who would otherwise not be able to gain Internet access.

Bangladesh is the other country with smart adaptive innovations. Here, local ISPs are using customised LAN equipment to deliver their services (p. 52). After a period of trial and error, the Bangladeshi ICT professionals have begun to manufacture locally extra-robust LAN equipment for outdoor installation in order to build networks that enable subscribers without telephone lines to get online.

Taken as a whole, the world's largest Internet user group is quickly evolving into one of the larger groups of customers for ICT goods and services in the world. This significant segment of the international marketplace extends deeply into the services sector, where many economies have become enthusiastic consumers of online content and services originating from outside the region. The chapters which follow show that this is especially true among Asia-Pacific communities who are fluent in English.

The staggering number of languages used across the region, in addition to English, is one of the most vivid demonstrations of the diversity of Asia Pacific. Besides being home to some of the technologically most advanced economies, it is also home to some of the most technologically deprived countries in the world. Afghanistan (p. 21) and Timor-Leste (p. 279) have just recently begun reconstruction of their infrastructure. And citizens in a couple of other economies in the region still find the Internet a largely forbidden zone.

This diversity presents the ICT community in Asia Pacific, and beyond, with a testbed where technologies, policies, legislation, business models, content-creation strategies, and services can be piloted and their impact measured. We have much to learn from the region as it finds its own way forward.

Content
Online services
Innovative and key initiatives
Enabling policies
Some trends and concerns